We can’t really prove that MAD has worked without seeing what would have happened if we hadn’t done MAD.

I’d argue that without MAD, the cold war might not have happened, which could have avoided a massive number of conflicts.

Careful with the noble savage fallacy. Europe was constantly ravaged by disease due to animal domestication, in ways the Americas were not. Many Native American civilizations created insane mathematical, ecological, and civil wonders during their existences. They 100% would have used double-blind studies if they had any major reason to advance medicine prior to Europeans bringing plagues.

The title is the punchline. Magnets move things with their fields, the magnet itself doesn’t need to apply force on the things it moves. ‘work’ is a physics term for applying a force over a distance.

That’s fair, though I think we also should thank the use of Travelling Wave Tubes (TWTs or ‘twits’). These little tubes of witchcraft amplify the transmission signal to make sure we can still hear, say, the Voyager 1 that’s currently over 15-billion miles away.